STATE HOUSE ROUNDUP -- Alexa, buy property in Massachusetts

The Red Sox may be done for the season, but there were plenty of pitches being thrown around Boston as the Amazon wooing efforts officially got underway.

Sadly, Massachusetts didn't have its proposal for Amazon to build its second headquarters in the state delivered to Jeff Bezos's porch via drone. Nor did it appear to include the story about Gov. Charlie Baker wanting to buy Echos as Christmas gifts for his children in 2015 after getting a device demo in Cambridge.

But it was still somewhat unique. Instead of sending an ace to the mound, the state has taken a closer-by-committee approach.

That hasn't always worked well on the diamond, but maybe in business the outcome will be different.

The pitch went something like this -- Massachusetts has the best schools, a deep talent pool and a high quality of living. So pick one of these 26 sites and let's start the hiring process.

Boston's bid, in partnership with Revere, centered on Suffolk Downs as an ideal, shovel-ready site with 161 acres of developable land ready and waiting for those 50,000 new jobs. But other cities, including Worcester, Billerica and Weymouth, had their own sales teams touting less-conventional locales.

Winning the Amazon sweepstakes would be another business coup for Baker, and it appears most Bay Staters would welcome it as long as any deal doesn't turn into a corporate raid on the state Treasury. But not everyone is salivating over the idea of welcoming Amazon to their neighborhood, and some, including Boston mayoral candidate Tito Jackson, have voiced concern over how it might displace residents and put unaffordable housing even further out of reach.

"No games. No politics. No drama. Just governing, leadership and getting things done," J.D. Chesloff, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, offered by way of a jacket-liner quote to support the state's bid. The state liked that one, putting it on Page 2 of its 182-page proposal.

Unfortunately, there were plenty of games, politics and drama unfolding on Beacon Hill last week, and not a lot of things getting done.

Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez and Sen. Karen Spilka haven't had a whole lot of time to build a working relationship since Sanchez got the House Ways and Means chairmanship this summer. They've had even fewer items of substance to work on together.

But things have gotten off to a rocky start after both branches passed what looked like a routine budget bill intended to close out spending for fiscal 2017, which ended in July.

In a sharp break from the style of his predecessor in the job, Brian Dempsey, Sanchez took his gripes with his Senate counterparts public last week. The Legislature headed into the weekend without completing the budget bill, which also included the ballyhooed ban on bump stocks.

Sanchez blamed Spilka for making the process even more difficult than it would otherwise be by using an unusual procedural move that makes it impossible to go into conference without one of the branches taking up the bill a second time.

He is also peeved over the Senate's decision to exclude $4.7 million for a youth violence prevention program from their version of the bill, and essentially accused senators of being more interested in talking about criminal justice policy than making it.

Spilka's response was characteristically muted as she downplayed the procedural differences and insisted that the Senate wanted to keep spending in the bill to fiscal 2017 obligations, rather than adding programmatic increases.

Now it's anyone's guess how this gets resolved, or who blinks first. And it's a dynamic that bears watching in the months to come as, presumably, the Legislature intensifies its efforts to pass criminal justice and health care reform.

That process is scheduled to start Oct. 26, when the Senate is expected to debate a sweeping criminal justice reform bill. And it wouldn't be surprising to see Paul Feeney, the newest senator-elect, take the oath in time to participate in that debate.

Feeney, a Foxborough Democrat and former IBEW official, bested Republican and Baker-backed Jacob Ventura in the Bristol and Norfolk Senate district to win the seat previously held by James Timilty. Feeney's victory means that a district once represented by one of the Senate's most-conservative Democrats could now have one of the most-liberal voices advocating for it on Beacon Hill.

As for health care, Sen. James Welch unveiled his slow-simmering proposal and it was equally sweeping in its breadth.

The proposal, among its many ideas, would impose new oversight of pharmaceutical companies, create a buy-in program that would allow companies to pay for their employees to have MassHealth coverage, and set targets for hospital readmissions and reimbursement rates for lower-paid hospitals.

The bill, in its entirety, is designed to wring savings over time from the health care system at-large, but lacks many of the specific and more-immediate reforms Baker has been seeking to get spending under control at MassHealth.

Baker didn't take a position on the bill either way, knowing it's a long way from being done. And he had a more-immediate health care crisis on his hands.

President Donald Trump's decision to end cost-sharing reduction payments under Obamacare would mean the loss of about $146 million in 2018, and $24 million through the end of the year for the state's insurers. Baker said Oct. 16 he hopes to find a way to mitigate the impact to insurers through December, but after that he said Congress needs to appropriate the money.

Trump's decision seemed to light a fire under Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Patty Murray of Washington, who rekindled their bipartisan talks and announced an agreement of two to fund the CSRs for another two years.

As Trump's support for the Alexander-Murray agreement vacillated, Baker endorsed it, for what that's worth, and wrote a few more letters urging compromise between the parties. The Health Connector, however, does not have the luxury of waiting to see what happens in Congress, and just a week after setting rates for 2018 had to go back and revise the premiums scales that some consumers will pay for coverage.

The loss of the CSRs now means that 80,000 people who don't qualify for tax credits under the Affordable Care Act will see their insurance premiums increases, on average, 26 percent, instead of 10.5 percent.

Incidentally, Baker was in Washington twice last week and neither had to do directly with health care talks.

Instead, Baker bookended his week with forums and panels on the opioid epidemic, including a meeting of the president's task force at the White House as that Gov. Chris Christie-led group nears final recommendations.